Gratuitous German
This Californian troper tends to use scheiße (shit) as an exclamation, usually when something bad happens. Since I don't actually speak German (though I am part-German) I'm trying to drop this. **This troper uses that too. He actually learned it from one of his high school teachers, who was using it to get crap past the radar. We blew his cover when we asked his brother, another teacher, what it meant. ***This troper does as well. One time he cursed it under his breath and the German exchange student looked surprised. Whoops. ***This troper does it too sometimes when she needs to get crap past the radar.. She also tends to call people who annoy her 'schwein' (pig). Both words are very satisfying to say. ***Actually, I don't know if it's just me, but I think a lot of people can tell what "schwein" means (swine ring a bell?). But that probably comes from living near a place called "Schweinfurt" for the last four years. ***Note from an actual real life German: "Scheiße" does literally mean "shit". But translating it to english as "fuck" would actually do it more justice. ***This troper, another real life German, disagrees. I think "scheiße" as a curse word is pretty similar to the englisch "shit", while "fuck" is a level more rude... Actually, the english word "Fuck" is used pretty commonly in Germany (at least by younger people), a friend of mine who once visited the USA and just continued using this habit until he got told by a seemingly very shocked hotel employee "Don't use the F-word!" *This Troper used mild german swears (mostly "Donnerwetter!") when working at a kindergarden. **Actually, to make it a swear you would have to say "zum Donnerwetter" (literally 'to thunder-weather') which would translate to something like "to hell with this". "Donnerwetter" is rather an exclamation of regard or admiration. **Heh. You do know that kindergarten is the German for "childrens' garden"? You're using German profanities at a German-named institution. **This Troper also uses "zum Donnerwetter" as a swear word, although not for any particular reason. *This troper did it habitually for years after coming back from Germany, even moreso when brother or sister were near and answering in German phrases. It doesn't seem gratuitous if you've moved to a big community of Army brats who were also over there, since we all picked up on the same expressions, but it did keep our civilian friends in the dark. And now that I'm studying Japanese, I try to make use of some phrases for the sake of practice, yet I somehow keep coming up with German. *This troper's mother seems to think that swearing in different languages =/= actually swearing, and says scheiße instead of shit. *This Troper will swear in German at work. Or say perfectly innocent things like "Could you get me more onions?" in German and watch people react as if I had called them a goat-fucking bastard. *This Troper does not speak German, yet swears in German. This is because his great-grandmother was German (and swore in German), and each succeeding generation of my father's family has picked up the habit from the generation before. *This Troper invokes this often, mainly because it's one of the hazards that comes with being a German major. *This troper occasionally Babelfishes his less serious forum posts into German for the hell of it. *This Troper has recently started taking German lessons. Since she obviously needs to practice pronunciation, she's started randomly using German phrases around friends and family. The fact that they don't understand a word of it just makes it funnier. *This Troper is a German student and the day her class learnt the words for various bits of genitalia was the day at least ten detentions were handed out. Scheisse. *This troper managed to pull of Gratuitous German, Gratuitous Spanish and Gratuitous Japanese all at once by calling a very happy toddler wearing a T-shirt that featured Miffy & "Hello Kitty" holding hands: Muy Sehr Kawaii !!! *This Troper came up with a nice Bilingual Bonus for the name of an attack in a game he's creating. It's "Diese Brezeln Machen Mich Durstig". *This Troper has a completely terrible Gratuitous German habit when in familiar company (friends or family), to the point of occasionally having to automatically translate what I've said before I'm asked to. Some jokes and puns I've come up with only make sense to my friends who are also learning German, which is a little bit annoying. Sometimes I just say random phrases I've learned for the hell of it. **It also applies to my friends who are learning German - our text messages commonly contain an unholy mixture of English, Irish, German, maybe some French or a tiny bit of Japanese, and then... Mangled versions of words combining some languages, deliberate phonetic spelling, in-jokes and in-jokey slang. (Muttimus or Muttimus Maximus being a favourite when talking about mothers, for example.) We have lots of fun. **My best friend complained about my terrible habit once, since she does French: Her: You know I can't understand when you randomly speak German. It's kind of strange. Me: Well, what I was saying was "Do you have a room free?" Like you would if you were in a hotel or B&B. *This Troper uses scheiße and dummkopf as Unusual Euphemisms for English swears. He also uses "Schnell!" when he needs people to hurry up. *This Troper is German, so the very idea of using gratuitous German does not really apply, however, I really like to insert phrases that were used as gratuitous german in movies or shows, even keeping the English/American accent. "Sitzen! Machen!" *Curious subversion: This troper, instead of using Gratuitous German, sometimes uses Gratuitous Dutch - to be particular, he used a lot of the Dutch guttural throat noises (I forget what they are called). He's trying to get out of that habit because he isn't actually Dutch-descent (Welsh, Scottish, German, possibly Polish, but not Dutch). *Gratuitous German has become something of a geeky trend at this troper's school, not leastly because our German teacher is quite attractive. (Much of the mangled German has to do with how hot he is— such as calling him, literally, "a fox", and "very, very hot". As in the temperature. Which does, in that construction, mean something more in line with "sexy"/"horny". Agh.) **Calling him a "Fuchs" (fox) doesn't mean anything about his sex-appeal or attractiveness in general. Actually it's about intelligence and - sometimes - being treacherous. *This British Troper has a running in-joke with a number of friends involving the words "Krank", "Krankenhaus" and "Krankenwagen", or; Sick, Hospital and Ambulance. Also "Achtung! Wienacht!" although thats more due to a certain song. *This troper is using it in his RPG Maker Game. Most things Freizkielien... *This Troper likes to say that he says good morning all through the day, up to 2:00 am, when he starts pretending to know German. Ja, ich sprechen sehr gut imachineren deutch. *This troper had an English teacher who used "Bahnhof" as a general exclamation or swear. For those not German-inclined, Bahnhof means train station. He only used it because it sounded like a swear (because Everything is Angrier in German, obviously). **In actual German there's also an expression "Ich versteh nur Bahnhof" ("I only understand train station," or perhaps more idiomatically, "All I heard was 'train station'"), sometimes shortened to just "Bahnhof!". It means you actually didn't understand anything of what you've just been told. *This troper uses German swear words constantly, and finds it easy to speak German in conversation. The problem is that this troper has never studied German other than a few phrasebooks, and is in fact taking Italian. For the past four years! *This troper was reading a book with his friends when the book said that the German word for "team" is Mannschaft. Hilarity ensued. *This troper recently went on a school trip to Germany for a month. While my german isn't particularly bad (although I'm likely to get the tenses wrong), one student in particular, who basically came over to get drunk, thought that "Entschuligoo" was proper German. Cue Facepalm. *In a science lesson I dropped something and said: 'Verdammte Scheiße aus der Hölle!' but I also tend to come out with 'Jesus Christus auf einem Scheiß-Motorrad!' *My best friend does this constantly. So much so that I've learned basic German just from her. Also, I use "guten tag", "ja", and "dumbkopf". *OK, I'll admit it. I once convinced a friend that Frau Schtücker was German for "penis". *This troper sprinkles his words with German just for the hell of it. *This Troper has a habit of saying "danke" instead of "thank you" for some reason. It kind of helps that it's some of the only German she remembers from her two years of German class... (Thankfully enough, she doesn't use much Gratuitous Japanese despite having taken a class for it too.) **This troper can also identify with that. She learned it in German class at highschool. This said, it's occasionally come in handy, such as helping out German folks she's met online ("kann ich ihnen helfen?") However, using German in front of Dutch folks (usually without realizing she's doing it — it's just become so ingrained) tended to result in giggles from them, with them providing the correct Dutch alternative ("danke" = "dank je" for them, for example. This troper also loves their, "you're welcome": "graag gedaan" sp?, sometimes just shortened to "GG".) *This troper is American-German and once used her semi-fluency to avoid a scam artist that was hanging around the local strip mall. (I'd been approached by a few different guys previously) This troper is also particularly fond of yelling "Ich wünsche dir Gesund!" to friends/people when they annoy her. Little do they know... *This Troper's nickname is Grafsburg, which he only recently found out would mean something like 'Count's Castle' in German. *This Troper's (American, English-speaking) family inexplicably peppers their conversations with phrases from various other languages. Perhaps the strangest is ufnet die Tur (spelling?), which we use as a command to close the door, although as far as This Troper can make out it actually means quite the opposite. **Proper spelling would be "öffnet die Tür", and it does indeed mean "open the door". *After a semester of German, this Filipino troper is rather guilty of this. **Likewise, this troper and his friends will speak pretty basic and probably wrong German to each other. He: I only played MGS back on PS 1. Me: Woah, Das Altschulen. **At this troper's public school, it was a common trend to reply "JAWOHL MEIN FUHRER" after anything a teacher said, despite the fact German wasn't even taught at that school. ***Be grateful. A native speaker of German overhearing you would probably kick your ass for this kind of stuff. Nazi jokes aren't exactly considered very funny here. ***YMMV, this troper can lol, for instance, a lot at Alfons Hatler of Der Wixxer "fame". Or Extra3's NNN. Then again, she's callous and not 100% German. ***But that's making fun about Nazis, not claiming that all germans are like Nazis 60 years ago. **This German troper prefers "Jawohl, Herr Obersturmbannführer!" **this troper spend her childhood at least once per year in Germany and lived in Silesia part of poland (once Prussian partition and german territory) was influenced with German for whole life.She likes to call everything 'Scheise'. ***Also I should mention that Silesian dialect/language is mix of polish/german and slovakian influences.Especially german *There are certain dubious advantages to growing up in the family I did. One of them is the rule that if you say something in one language, you are not allowed to reply in the same language unless neither party knows how to say it. On one hand, it means I know how to ask for the bathroom wherever I may roam. On the other this rule leads to the assumption that everyone understands when you ask, "Verstes du das?" or "Konst du Duetch?". It's even worse for the odd German guy I meet, who hopefully asks me if I speak his language. I may have broken a few hearts on account of my habitually dropping their language into mine. (Apologies to any actual speaker of German for my bad spelling. Our rule did not extend to the written word, nor were we picky about enunciation.) *This Troper loves the German language. He doesn't actually speak it, but he's prone to using German exclamations for added "oomph". His favourites are "Achtung baby!", "Einspruch!" and "Raus, raus!". He is of German heritage, though...that may have something to do with it. *This troper tends to refer to himself as dummkopf occasionally when he does something stupid, and prefers danke schon to thank you, confusing the recipient. Even though this troper doesn't swear, if he did, he'd swear in German. *This troper swears a lot in several different languages, German included. *This troper loves German. A lot. And ever sence she got into Team Fortress 2...she sprinkles it on almost everything. *This troper and her boyfriend sprinkle Gratuitous German in our conversations. Usually pet names but she also swears and he likes to quote Von Kaiser. *This troper sometimes uses the phrase "Alle gitarren mussen fur den Sieg rockundrollen!" (and done in an over the top "Hitler Public Speech" way or, when in print, using Gothic lettering◊), picked up from a satirical article in local computer magazine. **Also, "duppen w raketen und schuuu! Ausnach Kosmos!" (Ass-en into the rocket-en and whoosh! Away into space!) as a method of getting rid of someone, "O mein Gott! Das ist fenz (pronounced "fence") around mein plott! Und zwei klofeslinen *!" and throwing things "ausnach trashcan". *I couldn't find a "Gratuitous Dutch" page, so I'll post it here because it is related. This American troper grew up in next door to a family of Dutch immigrants and was very close friends with their son. Naturally, I picked up a fair amount of Dutch, which I continued to use. I later became (and still am right now) an exchange student to Germany. I learned German pretty fast, but the close "feel" of the two languages has caused me not only to speak German with a somewhat conspicuous Dutch accent, but also throw in random Dutch words with my German, e.g., I never say "aber" for "but"; I always replace it with Dutch "maar." Why this is, I do not know. I can only chalk it up to my upbringing. I still can't figure out why I can't get "aber" or "und" to come out of my mouth, though. **I do that too. The difference? I've never met a Dutch person in my life, nor am I of Dutch descent. I just really like the sound and feel of the language. I don't usualy talk to other people in Dutch (partly because I study it very casualy and don't really know that much), but I do sometimes swear at my friends and then refuse to tell them what it means. I also talk to myself in a mixture of actual Dutch and Dutch-sounding Simlish. I like to think my accent is pretty good, because I listen to a lot of Dutch music. *I do swear in English, but am known to swear in Italian and German, as well as mutter other, less then pleasant things using my patchy, incomplete knowledge of those languages. *This Troper often says ausgezeichnet. It has a nice ring to it. **And Mr. Burns catchphrase in the german dub. *This Troper often insults other people in German. This has arguably gotten worse since she started practicing getting "in-character" for her Medic cosplay. *One of this Britalian troper's friends at school gets pissed whenever I say "Du hast mittelschmerz" to him. I also regularly swear in German and Italian. **"You have middle pain" what does this even mean? *I definitely do this. I have been known to say "Guten Nacht" at night, "tschüß" when leaving, or when parents are leaving, saying "Danke" instead of "thank you", bitte instead of "you're welcome" and for no thank you, and pronouncing the town we live in the German way. It doesn't help that we live in Germany, and have lived in Germany for the last four years. So, maybe since I use these words in Germany, it was rubbing off on me. **Also, I could find a place for gratuitous Finnish, so I'll just add it here (even though the two languages sound nothing alike). When my mom and I speak in Finnish to each other (sadly I have a small knowledge of the language) my father has no idea what we're talking about. *I've got a few. In high school I would say "scheisse" to [1], which was especially important in my private Christian school. I still say it every now and then, because I find it to be very satisfying. Also, I used to occasionally refer to my sister as "schwester". My Dad will use snippets of German every now and then (he's half-German and took three years of the language in high school while also speaking it at home). *This is how this Troper knows he's been playing too much Silent Hunter and Company Of Heroes. He routinely answers with "ja?" or "da?" (Russian, ironically), gestures with "schnell!", thanks people with "danke schon", and has replaced "hey!" with "achtung!" *My mom is German, and my dad knows German, so sometimes he'll say a German phrase to her. *This Troper is long accustomed to greeting his professors with "Morgen", bidding people "danke", and swearing using all manner of German. He tends to string words together ("Scheisse-verdamtenkopf!") in ways that make no sense but are satisfying still. Random German words tend to wander into his conversations, as well. *This troper has been studying German for a few years and prefers to swear in German since it sounds much eviler and for Getting Crap Past The Radar at work. She also tends to yell "Schnell!" at people to hurry up, a habit she picked up from her father who is German. Category:Troper Tales